On March 24th 2015 I gave a talk at the Art of Neuroscience symposium in the beautiful Eye in Amsterdam. More information about this yearly event can be found here.

In my talk I presented the Virtual Reality visualization of live EEG data I created with my team mates Eva Delincakova and Bert Spaan at the Hack the Brain hackathon in May 2014. I discussed the potential of Virtual Reality for immersive data visualization and how this could be used in the field of education.

The day before the event Tycho Hoogland and me were interviewed about the event by BNR Nieuwsradio Eyeopeners. Here you can listen to The program (in Dutch), our part starts afer 14 minutes.

An important part of the event was the competition for which many beautiful images were submitted. The winning image, by Jean-Christophe Billeter and many others can be found here.

On the 19th of June 2014 at 10.00, I’ll teach a workshop for the Embodied Vision course of the Media Technology MSc. program. Below you can find a short description of the workshop and the assignment. After the workshop I’ll post a summary of what we’ve discussed.

Embodied Vision Workshop: Augmented and Virtual Reality with Unity3D

In this workshop we will go through the basics of working with Unity3D, discuss interesting projects made with the software and experiment with creating your own Augmented or Virtual Reality project. I will explain about the Vuforia library which can be used to create mobile AR apps and get you started to develop for Oculus Rift. For the workshop you will need Unity Pro which can be downloaded from unity3d.com. Please install the software beforehand. You can make use of the 30-day trial version.

Assignment
Groups: 1-3 people
During the lectures you have learned about many different special and visual effects used in film and the different goals (such as: distraction, shock, spectacle, narrative, integration, immersion) that can be reached by applying these effects. For this assignment you are challenged to make use of the visual effects offered by Augmented and Virtual Reality to support one (or more) of these goals you find most interesting.
Since learning Unity3D is an essential part of this workshop, you should make use of this software for your project. Exceptions can be made however, if you can give good reasons for this.

In Western tradition, thinking has been commonly seen as a very secluded activity. As our environment is getting more and more saturated with technologies, it is becoming clear however, that our minds are less separated from the world as we might think. Many questions arise, questions about artificial intelligence, about the technologies we use to solve problems and how these affect the way we think. What does it mean to know something when we have all the world’s information at our fingertips? Can thinking technologies help us to understand more complex problems? What does it mean when technology enters the brain? Can we decode our brain activity to such extent that we can actually read people’s thoughts? Does the use of technological aids affect what we should learn? How should this change be incorporated in our education system?

The Mind Extensions website aims to create an environment where ideas around these matters are created, collected, exchanged and discussed. These ideas can come in many different shapes and sizes: from essays to interactive artworks and from poems to web lectures. We hope to build an active community with various people from different disciplines who read, write, share and discuss posts.

This summer BijlesinWassenaar organizes a Summerclass during which pupils learn the basics of reading and writing code. They learn about if-statements, data types, loops and arrays. They are familiarized with new techniques such as Augmented and Virtual Reality. They apply their new learnt knowledge in a small project they make themselves!

For the Hack the Brain hackathon, organized by Waag Society, TNO and the Donders Institute, we created an immersive 3D environment of EEG data using the Oculus Rift. To experience our project you wear a cap with electrodes to capture an EEG signal from the electrical activity in your brain. The Oculus Rift places you inside your brain from where you can see the captured brain activity and fly through your brain. The intensity of the visual effects expresses the activity of alpha waves in that part of the brain. This immersive environment could be used by students to better understand brain activity and the EEG signal this produces. ADHD patients could use it as a neurofeedback system to improve their concentration level and neurologists might use it to simulate the experience of epileptic patients when they have a seizure.

Media

On the Mind Extensions website you can find the article I wrote about the entire hackathon. he crew of the Dutch television program ‘De Kennis van Nu’ reported live from the hackathon, the playlist is embedded below. The television show can be found here.

On the 28th of August 2013 I presented my graduation project, which was graded an 8.5.

Developing an Augmented Reality application to promote an extended concept of cognition in education

[ABSTRACT]
The ever decreasing size and price of computer parts seems to be leading to computing power becoming ubiquitous. Similar to technology such as pen and paper, computing power becomes intertwined with our problem solving processes in such ways that it becomes invisible. This development has, and will have, enormous influence on our cognitive profiles. The field of education however, has barely changed to cope with this change in cognitive profiles. While developments in information technologies are changing how we learn in many ways, we believe it is essential to rethink what we should learn in this perspective of increasing availability and accessibility of computing power.

This research reviews an extended concept of cognition, in which technological elements can actually be part of the cognitive process. We suggest this view as a framework to discuss the goals of education and the technological aids that can be used to reach these goals. To raise this discussion, a mobile application is developed which shows the potential of Augmented Reality techniques to display context-sensitive information, which can be incorporated in the problem solving process.

The output of my research project consisted of three parts:

1. An article published in the third issue of AR[t] magazine of the ARLab titled: ‘Augmented Education: How AR technologies extend our minds’.

2. An Augmented Reality app ARMath, created using Unity 3D and the Vuforia AR library. The prototype recognizes mathematical statements and displays extra information on the problem in the vicinity, such as a graph when an equation is recognized. Because of the limitations of live text recognition, this prototype uses image recognition and therefore only works for certain mathematical statements.

After the success of the first edition of the 3 Oktoberapp in 2012, we developed a completely new 2013 edition, now for Android and iPhone. The app received 5000+ downloads. The 3 Oktoberapp 2013 includes a complete and scrollable program for Leidens Ontzet, a soundboard with carnival sounds and all sorts of extra information.

The app also allowed for sending push messages, which was used by the local police for crowd management and possible emergencies.

Together with Berber de Vries we developed ARBieb, an Augmented Reality application for children’s books. The app stimulates children to read books and share short reviews. At the same time, it introduces children to Augmented Reality.

The app was developed using Unity and the Vuforia Augmented Reality library.

The app can be downloaded from the Play store, although an updated version will be released soon.